Nemesis' Gardens
by Allureofproductivity
Summary: "Blood faultlessly broached redeemed the sullied air, the earth's grossness." Sylvia Plath, The Goring Their life was one big comedy of errors right now, and the funny thing was, everyone was dead.


It's Lydia who makes the decision to head south, towards Mexico and possible salvation. Beacon Hills is a pile of ashes and twisted corpses, she says, and it's time to go. Isaac wants to head towards the coast, or maybe Canada, but Lydia's done the research, and quickly shuts him down.

Canada's a melted husk of trees and shattered skyscrapers, and the coast is full of refugees all trying to seek solace in Asia or Russia, whichever they can get to first. It's too risky, especially with Isaac being what he is.

Because the existence of werewolves, for better or for worse, is common knowledge right now, and they are hot commodities when you can find them, both to scared civilians and the crippled military. It makes sense. Strong, chock full of regenerative tissues, and complete with their own lethal weapons, werewolves are the perfect guard dogs or grunts. Reports of them being kidnapped off the streets are relatively commonplace in centers of human activity, and Lydia refuses to take that chance with Isaac. He's all she has left.

They're leaving tomorrow, both packed and ready to abandon what's left of their home. Her bag is full to bursting with useful books, clothes, bandages, antiseptic, soap, and water, and Isaac, true to form, has mostly food. She curls up next to him on the sooty couch in the fractured skeleton that was once the McCall living room, and he drapes an arm over her waist gently and buries his nose in the soft skin at the base of her throat. He will have nightmares tonight, she's sure of it, and she prepares herself mentally. Isaac's nightmares are terrifying for all involved.

They're both asleep when the first bomb falls, right around the remnants of the high school swimming pool. The blast is concussive, even from 10 miles away, and she jerks and Isaac's dragging her from the couch. She's on the ground, a long body draped over her, before she's even fully conscious. Another bomb falls, this time closer, and she screams as shrapnel tears through the room and the muscled torso shielding her own soft one and curling around the crown of her head. Blood, Isaac's blood, drips into her eyes and runs down her cheeks. He barely grunts at the pain, still riding an adrenaline high. There's one more blast, leaving her ears ringing, and then the planes are out of range, probaby gunning for Seattle, which, last time she checked, hadn't been completely demolished by Iranian fighter jets and their highly explosive progeny.

A quiet moan sounds from above her and then Isaac's warmth is gone and she crawls to his side. He's gushing blood from his lower abdomen, a fat, discolored shard of steel having made him its new home, and she grimaces in disgust. Pulling parts of explosives out of her only remaining packmate is not her idea of pleasant, and it happens far too often. Damn that boy and his hero complex.

"Lysiaaaa…"

He always slurs out her name with an S when he's in pain.

"I know, okay. I'm working on it."

She doesn't mean to sound so sharp. Damn it.

She grasps the slick steel with one hand and braces him to the floor with the other. He makes a heavy sound that might be a grunt, and she pulls. There's a growl from the prone kid beneath her and a foul squelch that has the bile rise in her throat, and then it's over. She tosses the shrapnel recently eradicated from Isaac's torso away from her with more angry force than strictly necessary.

He coughs, bringing up a small spatter of blood, and shoves his way to sitting. She catches the grimace of pain, the blood still seeping from the wound, and grabs the roll of bandages.

"Don't waste them, Lyd. I'll heal."

"Yes, and in the meantime, I would really like you to not bleed out or spill your guts across the floor if you twist wrong. I refuse to sew your guts back in."

"I won't…"

"I don't care. I'm bandaging you just in case, Isaac. I will leave you for dead if your guts fall out. I must draw the line somewhere."

He grins sheepishly and she tugs his shirt over his head, whistling low and quiet when she sees the gaping mess of bloody tissues and maybe a gleam of intestine through the sheen of possibly healing flesh. The gash itself is roughly six inches long and jagged around the edges. She wraps him up gently, slowly, and he lets his head drop to her shoulder.

"Still hurting, huh?"

He whimpers, two decibels down from an outright keening sound that she has heard from his mouth a grand total of once in her life, and her stomach squeezes nauseatingly and her heart fractures.

"Want some aspirin?"

Nod nod. He's hit the nonverbal stage of the Isaac Lahey Healing Experience, completely wiped out and probably feeling sickish with shock. She smacks his lips gently, butterfly light, and he swallows the teensy white pills without water. He falls asleep soon after, for which she is grateful, his long legs draped over her knees and his head pressed to her left temple, mouth gaping. She doesn't sleep any more that night.

He half wakes, shaking with terror, sometime around four in the morning, screaming silently for Scott and Melissa. He sobs for a good hour afterwards, still asleep enough to not realize he's doing it, and she just holds him, wiping the sweat from his forehead. She's crying too.

They don't speak of it once the sun comes up and they start last minute checks. She's finished with hers and has just changed in the dusty half hallway when Isaac calls for her, voice strained.

"Hey, Lydia?"

"Yeah?"

"Where's the aspirin?"

She runs to him from where she had been putting up her hair, scowling at her disheveled reflection in the shattered hall mirror. He's doubled over on the couch, one hand pressed to his side, the other rifling through her bag, shaky fingers skimming over the top of one of Stiles' old hoodies. The one that says "Beacon Hills Cyclones" across the back, that has a little bit of a bloodstain on the hood from when Isaac broke his nose in a pickup game and landed directly on top of Stiles. She can still hear Stiles saying, with great derision and some poorly hidden brotherly affection, "Dude, really? I don't particularly care if you are romantically entangled with one of my best female friends, I will end you, wolfy." The real flashback hits her hard, world spinning and morphing into rain and fire and her cellphone gripped tightly in her fist, and she falls over, confused and dizzy.

_"Lyds, I'm fine, ok?"  
"Stiles? STILES?"  
His corpse lay at her feet, still smouldering in places. He was still smiling, even in this horrible death, gaping mouth, missing a lower jaw, staring her down from a half smashed skull. She screamed and screamed and screamed until she was hoarse, until she was exhausted, until Isaac carried her away from the remnants of Stiles' life, his house, the twisted hunk of metal that was once his jeep._

"LYDIA. It's just a flashback, come on, you're okay, you're safe, you're with me."

She shoves him away from her, desperately attempting to ignore the trembling in her limbs. She finds the industrial sized white bottle and practically throws it at him before retreating to the far end of the couch, watching through weary eyes as he casually downs four. She should check his wound, she should hold her hand to his forehead to check for fever, make sure that bomb was as clean as they thought it was last night. The Iranians, regrettably, know about werewolves too, and oftentimes the bombs they drop on their way to larger cities are laced with aconite. That's how Peter Hale died, in glory and fire and aconite powder filling his lungs up with black fluid, shrapnel heaving and gasping with every wet breath, sticking out like sparklers from his tortured body.

Luckily she has quite a store of raw wolfsbane, courtesy of the late, great Christopher Argent.

Lydia knows the signs of PTSD, and she also knows that she and Isaac are currently the poster children of shell shock. But there's nothing they can do about it, except talk through it, and they don't have the time for that right now.

Right now, they need to get the hell out of dodge.

I really need to actually finish something. Hope you enjoyed!

Stay Shiny,

Allure


End file.
